My first introduction to this cake came on a brisk evening last April, in the form of a cheerful crowd of teeny baby Bundts at the launch party for Sweeter Off the Vine, the cookbook it comes from. The spread there, all baked by the inimitable Yossy herself, might have been one of the most delicious arrays of baked goods I’ve ever been privy to, from saffron lime bars and rich brown butter blondies to moist cornmeal cakes with dainty pink glaze and flaky rhubarb galettes. Yet these little Bundts, almost like pound cake in their heft but still brightly tart from a citrus glaze, still stood out so much that — shh — I squirreled away a baby cake or two to take back to friends on the way home, unable to help myself. I’ve been waiting to share it here ever since.

What a strange, hard week this has been. It feels like it has been hard in every sense of the word — difficult, unyielding. I hope everyone is okay. This is the first of a number of recipes I’ve had saved up for these first few baby-filled months, and, thankfully, it is so very easy. I think “easy” was going to be my mantra in the kitchen for the foreseeable future no matter what, now that we have a little person to cuddle and feed and care for, but right now it feels particularly apt to share something that comes together without much effort, without any stress, to be a treat that soothes and indulges.

Too often I feel like scones get the short end of the stick in the coffee shop scene. Maybe it’s because they sit out behind the glass for a little bit too long by the time that they make it into a wax paper bag, ending up just a little too dry and flavorless, unsatisfyingly crumbly, and thus under-appreciated. I’ll admit that before I tried making them at home, I succumbed to that belief, too, thinking that the way I wanted scones to taste was something that existed only in my mind: little puffy triangles that were craggy on the outside, but tender and moist within, with just the slightest springiness to them to distinguish them from cakes or cookies. But in actuality, I think a homemade scone, fresh and warm from the oven, is just that. Slight crunch on the outside, soft inside, with a subtle resilience to the crumb. And they’re, surprisingly, so very easy to make! We should all have homemade scones in our kitchens. (At least on the weekends.)

I’ve been mostly working from home in these last couple of weeks before the home stretch, but went in to the office last week to wrap up loose ends, take home all the heels that I totally forgot about for the last six months, and to do fun things like meet with my pro bono clients, who got all the adoptive funding we requested! It did mean that that hearing didn’t end up happening, but when it’s because we got everything we asked for, that’s okay with me. To be clear, I think our happy outcome had everything to do with (1) my clients being wonderful parents with the sweetest daughter who really deserved it, (2) the other side really wanting to postpone the hearing, and (3) me really not wanting to postpone the hearing because hey guys, I have a biological baby deadline, and nothing to do with any lawyering I did. But in a job where most of the time I represent (or, help people senior to me help partners senior to them represent) clients in long, drawn-out matters with things at stake that sometimes feel more abstract than real, helping parents get funding for their sunny, sweet nine-year-old, and getting this thank-you card, was about the best cap on starting maternity leave that I could ask for.

Evidently, or so I’m told, it’s less than a month until a third little bowl is headed our way. What! It doesn’t feel like it. From time to time I catch myself assuming that this is just how life is going to be from now on, having a watermelon for a belly, the mysterious inability to ever feel cold, and a maximum waddling velocity of a couple yards per hour. I assumed for so long that pregnancy would be difficult that it’s disorienting — and, I’m sure, obnoxious — to end up one of those women who actually loved most of it. (Predictably, I’m now just scared about whether the next one will be the one that’s bad.)

Overwhelmingly, pregnancy thus far has been a much more peaceful experience than I ever thought it would be. This isn’t to say that it’s been a total walk in the park (in case you’ve had or are having a rough one!) but before it all happened, I had fearful visions of hugging the toilet, or raging at B2, or doing both at the same time, nonstop for nine-point-five months. Thankfully, neither of those things has come to pass. If anything, with the exception of a few spectacular sobbing-laughing-hiccuping meltdowns (“I k-know I-I’m l-laughing but it’s not funny!”) I might even be a little bit more rational than my non-pregnant self, which is a bizarre development we never anticipated. Then again, my non-pregnant self once Donkey-Kong-ground-pounded a half-eaten bag of B2’s potato chips because he hates eating chip crumbs and I was mad. (This was not my proudest moment.) So maybe there was nowhere to go but up.

If there’s one thing that’s taken my baby-growing life by storm, though, it’s pregnancy brain. Was this as real for you as it is for me? Our apartment is beginning to look like a really boring reenactment of Memento — there are Post-Its all over the house, written by my past self and asking in accusatory caps: “IS THE AC OFF?” “IS THE OVEN OFF?” “DO YOU HAVE YOUR WATER BOTTLE?” like a stern, disembodied mother. And this is just a short list of the things that I (can remember that I) have forgotten, or lost, or missed:

Turning off the AC

Turning off the oven

Turning on the oven

My phone, in the parking garage at work

My password to log in to the app that finds your phone

My security pass, while retracing my steps back to my office to find my phone because I could not use the app that finds your phone

My Costco grocery list

My new Costco grocery list, somewhere in the middle of walking around Costco

Highway exits

Right turns

Left turns

Probably many things that should be on this list but have now been forgotten.

Dear diary. Dear everyone. On Sunday, I had my very first cup of coffee in four months. !!! To be fair, I think it was about two tablespoons of coffee in a cup of milk and a boatload of sugar, so it tasted more like melted coffee ice cream than coffee, but I’m going to say it counts. It was the most exciting moment of my Sunday. Or July. I never everimagined I’d stop drinking coffee while pregnant — instead, I was terrified of going without it, and I’m pretty sure I looked up that “one-cup-a-day” rule way before B3 was a figment of our imagination (and maybe even before B2 was a figment of mine). I was holding onto that rule with both hands and feet and entire being all the way up until one day around week 6, when I woke up and coffee suddenly and inexplicably smelled like the worst thing in the world. Such woe. But somehow this weekend, after four months of matcha (which was, granted, far from the worst), I opened up the coffee tin and thought mm instead of oh no get this noxious tub of poison away from me, and B2 had to listen to me chant “look at me, I’m drinking coffee!” as I sipped a tiny melted-ice-cream for the rest of the morning. It was an excellent Sunday.

This should probably come as no surprise, but my favorite thing about new places is the new food that I’ve never had before. Hawaii has had a wealth of these in the years since B2 first brought me to visit, and on our last trip back earlier this summer — just when I thought I was getting the lay of the land — B2’s mom (as part of her nonstop feeding extravaganza for B3) produced a couple of cheerful little yellow-striped melons that were wholly adorable and wholly foreign to me. As it turns out, they were Korean melons, or chamoe, and I was instantly in love — they’re floral and sweet like honeydew, with a heady, syrupy smell when you cut them open, but the white flesh is firm and crunchy, almost like a (sweet, and not at all spicy) radish. And they’re pretty much perfect straight from the fridge on a warm summer day.

I think I read awhile back (while in the throes of grief that the closest Crumbs shop to me was closing down) that cupcakes have been on a little bit of a roller coaster in the last few years, embarking on a wild ascent from supermarket-only to trendy to out-of-your-mind popular before being ousted from their throne by donuts. Something like that? In this little world of mine, they’ve been on a steady trajectory of adoration only — for me, they have that nostalgic timelessness of Funfetti box mix and frosting out of a can, and even at their most gourmet they’re stout and cheerful and low-maintenance, ready to be lined up on vinyl tablecloths at birthday parties and eaten with utensil-less abandon (or, in my case, eyed carefully to see which one is a little bit fatter than the others, and then eaten with abandon). I’m pretty sure I will always love them. Which makes it all the more astonishing to me that there are hardly any recipes for cupcakes to be found in this space, and none at all since around 2013! With work kicking my butt lately, and in the mood for an easy but buoyantly happy recipe to disrupt that monotony, I thought this was a perfect time to change that.

Yep, it’s true. I went and made oatmeal out of bubble tea. (Or bubble tea out of oatmeal?) I have no idea how it happened. The idea landed in my lap when I was making, not any other kind of kooky oatmeal, but the simplest one I’ve had in years — on a particularly blustery day in this reluctant spring we’ve been having, I had a hankering for super simple, childhood-basics oatmeal, a hug in a bowl in protest of our chilly February-like April. So I made an oatmeal like my dad used to make on sleepy schoolday mornings, just milk and oats and plenty of sugar on the side, served with a reminder to eat it around the edges of the bowl first, because that’s where it’s coolest. Then, halfway through my creamy-sweet bowl, I suddenly thought of another comfort food (drink) I love, with milk and plenty of sugar — and boba, instead. And lo, here we are. Bubble tea oatmeal! Oatmeal bubble tea!